Birth Weight, Infant Mortality, and Fetal Programming

Dr. Timothy B. Gage, Professor of Anthropology at the State University of New York, Albany will be talking about how low birth weight has been an important, albeit arbitrary, concept for the study of infant mortality and morbidity. Here he reports on 25 years of research developing an indicator of physiological fitness at birth, which, while still based on birth weight, appears to be less arbitrary and more effective than low birth weight. Associations of this indicator with fetal loss, infant mortality and morbidity later in life (e.g. obesity, hypertension and other fetal programming outcomes) are presented.